Taiwan

2003

New York, July 25, 2003—Taiwan's High Court today sentenced reporter Hung Che-cheng to one and a half years in prison on sedition charges for allegedly revealing military secrets.

Though the court granted Hung a three-year suspended sentence, the threat of imprisonment remains.

The sedition charges stem from a July 29, 2000, article that Hung wrote for the now defunct Power News. Government prosecutors claimed that the report included classified information about Taiwan's military exercises, a sensitive topic because of Taiwan's strained relations with mainland China, which views the island as a renegade province and has threatened to take the territory by force.

The vicious murder of Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan focused international attention on
the dangers faced by journalists covering the U.S. "war on terror," yet
most attacks on journalists in Asia happened far from the eyes of the
international press. In countries such as Bangladesh and the
Philippines, reporters covering crime and political corruption were as
vulnerable to attack as those reporting on violent insurgency. Seven
journalists were killed in 2002 for their work in Asia.

Shortly after U.S. president George W. Bush arrived
in South Korea's capital, Seoul, in February 2002 for a state visit,
the North Korean state news agency, KCNA, reported a miracle: that a
cloud in the shape of a Kimjongilia, the flower named after the
country's leader, Kim Jong Il, had appeared over North Korea. "Even the
sky above the Mount Paektu area seemed to be decorated with beautiful
flowers," KCNA said. The piece was a whimsical effort to trump news of
Bush's visit to the other side of the divided Korean peninsula,
according to The New York Times.

Taiwan's free and feisty media continued to report
aggressively on everything from sensitive political issues to colorful
celebrity scandals despite several high-profile government efforts to
rein in controversial reporting.